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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

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Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#441

Post by strogonoff »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #108
danielbln wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a pink elefant that lives in the 7th dimension and contains every person's consciousness in the shape of a magic peanut. Or it may not.

Legitimately made me lol. Thank you for being the rational one. When topics of the mind come up even people who are normally smart and rational can turn into quacks.

Topics of the mind are self-referential and so make most people self-select into three groups, in order of decreasing religious fanaticism:

1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.

2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.

3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#442

Post by anon291 »

IshKebab wrote: post #240
anon291 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Along the lines of "animals don't have feelings" which seems to be mostly pushed by Christians. Can you provide any source for this claim? The historical Christian belief is that animals have souls and feelings and inner experiences.

It stems from the belief that only humans have a soul. Here's an example: https://www.christianforums.com/threads/animals-dont-have-fe... I think that view has changed a lot over the last few decades but certainly 30 years ago it was pretty common.

This is not a Christian belief, Augustine and Aquinas (among others) openly believed animals, plants, even stones, had souls. A lot of mistakes regarding Christian theology is people mistaking something they heard '30 years ago' with a millennia old religion

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#443

Post by anon291 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #141
anon291 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that science is ultimately a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality (which is not a universal belief by any means, and is utterly religious in nature), then yes, this is true. On the other hand, if we take an irreligious look at things and try to keep focus on just what we observe, one is forced to make the opposite conclusion, as the very basic building bloc…

That’s not what science is at all. If reality changes science will adapt.

If laws change; laws imply that things always work the same, but they don't. At a micro level the universe is describable in the aggregate, but seemingly unpredictable.

Science can change sure, but it cannot predict the unpredictable. You're not wrong to say science adapts but to say that quantum uncertainty hasn't caused the metaphysics of science (or at least some scientists) to change, is intellectual dishonesty.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#444

Post by anon291 »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #298
anon291 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that science is ultimately a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality (which is not a universal belief by any means, and is utterly religious in nature), then yes, this is true. On the other hand, if we take an irreligious look at things and try to keep focus on just what we observe, one is forced to make the opposite conclusion, as the very basic building bloc…

What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing s…

> What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality?

I was thinking photons which, when passed through a diffraction grating one at a time will cause an interference pattern on average but whose individual course is -- as far as we know -- unpredictable.

This flies in the face of the idea that the universe is perfectly predictable.

> The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level

Indeed.. an axiomatic religious belief that has incredible amounts of evidence and that has proven very useful, but for the reason I mentioned above, certainly could not be the case. We shouldn't confuse the laws of statistics either certainty, even if the law of large numbers usually works.

> Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently?

I mean there are hundreds of them at this point. Passing single electrons or photons or buckeyballs through diffraction gratings (humans too!, we think). The stern Gerlach experiment. I can go on. Determining the individual spin states of entangled pairs of particles.

> Lastly, if someone did produce an experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is, an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the same, but the result of the experiment being different, then the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible would be wrong

Well like I said we have lots of experiments whose results are different and who we cannot predict (some of which the math says we can never know), and yet, at the macro level we do science anyway because of our religious belief that it usually is okay.

For someone who purports to defend science, I'm shocked at the level of ignorance yet arrogance in this comment.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#445

Post by int_19h »

strogonoff wrote: post #17
tomhoward wrote: post #11

I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…

A philosophical framework in which creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic materialism. Of course, it’s not the only framework available. Among the modern takes, Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an interesting one that appears to align…

> However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).

Coincidentally, this is why I'm generally wary of this line of thinking. It does remind me of Descartes, who was arguing that animals couldn't "really" feel pain (and thus e.g. vivisection is perfectly ethical): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#On_animals

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#446

Post by anon291 »

tomrod wrote: post #334
mistermann wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are declaring it to be a fact that science is flawless. Defining something to be true by definition can certainly cause it to be appear to be true (read some forum discussions among even smart people on the internet if you do not believe this), but it doesn't guarantee that it will be.

Science is adaptable to reality -- therefore, it reflects reality as it is presented. Esoteric arguments portraying an ineffable, unobservable stream of will that never interacts with reality is not observable by definition; since it doesn't interact with reality, it can be safely ignored. Roko's basilisk be damned!

> portraying an ineffable, unobservable stream of will

I'm not sure why you feel the need to bring divinity into this. The universe is not purely a automaton not because of some purported unobservable god, but simply because all experiments indicate that we cannot predict the behavior of the basic building blocks of the universe.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#447

Post by int_19h »

skissane wrote: post #369
strogonoff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A philosophical framework in which creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic materialism. Of course, it’s not the only framework available. Among the modern takes, Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an interesting one that appears to align…

> Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie). I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs b…

> I'm OpenAI GPT-9, and there are 13,784,312 fungible instances of me currently running

This reminded me of https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#448

Post by IshKebab »

anon291 wrote: post #442
IshKebab wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It stems from the belief that only humans have a soul. Here's an example: https://www.christianforums.com/threads/animals-dont-have-fe... I think that view has changed a lot over the last few decades but certainly 30 years ago it was pretty common.

This is not a Christian belief, Augustine and Aquinas (among others) openly believed animals, plants, even stones, had souls. A lot of mistakes regarding Christian theology is people mistaking something they heard '30 years ago' with a millennia old religion

I didn't mean it was an official position of the Church, just one that a lot of Christians have (or at least had fairly recently). Let's not no-true-Scotsman this.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#449

Post by card_zero »

naasking wrote: post #265
card_zero wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else. There's a dubious implicatio…

> Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false. > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. What it's attempting to show is the l…

Much though I'd be interested in Daniel Dennett's responses, I don't think you understood mine. I'm saying:

Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically.

If you want to sweep this aside with a magic gesture, and assert that she does somehow have all the facts (alright, all the objective third person facts), you are also making the science, communication, imaginative simulation, verbal learning process, all that kind of stuff, into something magical. Because what you're saying is that it now somehow has the power to be exactly like the real experience, which in this magical scenario will thus come as no revelatory surprise to her. We only expect it to be a surprise because of realism about the limits of book-learning as we know it, because she can only learn all that is explicitly known about colors that way, which is not all there is to know about them, and is not even all that is commonly known.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#450

Post by anon84873628 »

naasking wrote: post #411
anon84873628 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.

Yes, people are capable of convincing themselves of all kinds of nonsense. The kind of ontological emergence you would require in such a model of qualia is still of a completely different kind than any other kind of emergence, and so still requires extending the ontology of basic physicalism. There seems to be very little motivation to do so at this point. Let's not repeat the mistakes of vitalism.

That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others.

Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up.

Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechanics is just as weird a departure as the reverse. And does Newtonian mechanics prepare you for the existence of Bayesian statistics? Biological agents bouncing around randomly? The gestalt of an ecosystem?

There's no reason to assert that we can't one day have the math for describing consciousness too.

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